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BYLINE: By PATRICK McGEEHAN SECTION: Section B; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 2 LENGTH: 360 words Of the dozens of facts and figures about sweets and flowers spilling out around Valentine's Day, the most surprising may be this: According to city officials, chocolate is New York's No. 1 specialty-food export. In a report released yesterday, the mayor's Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses estimated that chocolate makers in the city ship out $234 million worth of their products each year. At that rate, it said, chocolate ranks ahead of all other categories of specialty foods, like roasted nuts, cereal and beer. The report was the office's first comprehensive attempt to measure the size and economic contribution of the food-processing industry, which it describes as ''by far the most stable major manufacturing sector'' in the city. Over all, food making is a $5 billion industry that employs more than 19,000 residents, many of them immigrants who speak little English, the report said. Fewer of those jobs are in big plants, which have been disappearing, and more are in niche operations scattered throughout the five boroughs, said Carl Hum, director of the Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses. ''I don't think you're going to see large plants in New York City anymore; it's going to be small, entrepreneurial operations like this,'' Mr. Hum said, standing in the compact factory of Vere Chocolate on the sixth floor of a building on 27th Street just west of Broadway. Vere (pronounced ver-EE) is one of about 30 chocolatiers in the city, and most of them sell custom-made sweets at premium prices. Among Vere's specialties are dark chocolate wafers containing pink peppercorns, five of which cost $7.50. It also makes truffles for vegans. ''We focus on the health benefits of chocolate, as well as the luxury aspect,'' said Mona Johnson, an executive at Vere. James Parrott, chief economist with the Fiscal Policy Institute, which provided analysis for the study, said that New York ''is probably the major port of entry on the East Coast for cocoa and chocolate.'' He added that the relative health of the city's food sector ''has gone unnoticed for a long time, but people should recognize that it is significant.''
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1132 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Upstart Video Game Publisher To Focus on Small Developers BYLINE: By ROBERT LEVINE SECTION: Section C; Column 4; Business/Financial Desk; TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 8 LENGTH: 562 words Some video-game veterans plan to announce today the formation of a new publisher that they hope will act as the equivalent of an independent film company for small game developers. The new company, Gamecock Media Group, has some of the same top executives as Gathering of Developers, a publisher that was founded in the late '90s by several development companies that teamed up, like the first incarnation of United Artists in Hollywood, to gain more control over their business affairs. (It was sold in 1999 to the publisher Take-Two Interactive.) ''We want to bring some fun back to the game business,'' said Mike Wilson, Gamecock's chief executive. ''We can make games that look like anything out there for less money.'' Among the titles Gamecock is financing are Hail to the Chimp, a humorous animal fighting game being developed by a new company founded by the developer Alex Seropian, and Insecticide, a futuristic action adventure from Crackpot Entertainment. The idea is that Gamecock, based in Austin, Tex., will finance games with reasonable budgets, ask developers to share in the risk and outsource distribution to keep its costs low. The company is being financed by a single investor, who has declined to be identified. ''Most of the big publishers are publicly held, and Wall Street wants you to own trucks and have a floor of accountants and grow by a certain amount every year,'' Mr. Wilson said. He said he hoped to foster an artist-friendly environment in which the name of the developer, not the publisher, was identified with a game. Just as Gamecock offers many of the benefits of an independent studio, however, it could also face some of the same problems. The franchises that Mr. Wilson believes have grown stale are often among the best-selling games, and it can be easier for a large publisher to market its products. And, over the last few years, some of the top developers have been purchased by the publishers they worked with. Gamecock, which is to release its first games in 2008, will let developers retain the rights to their intellectual property, which is not standard in the video game business. Harry Miller, president and head of development, said that Gamecock might offer a lower advance than a developer could receive elsewhere, but a royalty structure that would provide more money on a hit. Under most deals, developers get a higher marginal royalty rate as sales increase, but Mr. Miller said that Gamecock would offer the highest royalty rate on every copy of the game sold. For some of the developers working with Gamecock, the most important aspect of the deal is the opportunity to retain the property they create. ''With an expensive game we'd like to retain the I.P.,'' said Simon Bradbury, the lead designer of Firefly Studios, which made the popular Stronghold series of PC games and is working on a title called Hero. Michael Levine, head of Crackpot Entertainment, said that he was eager to keep the rights to his company's characters so they could be used in other media. John Taylor, an analyst at Arcadia Investment, said giving developers control of their intellectual property is unlikely to spread in the industry. ''Typically when a creative person sits down with a source of money in any business, the first thing they argue about is who gets to own the intellectual property when they're done.''
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1133 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Here's the Online Line On Online Politics BYLINE: By ROBERT LEVINE SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; MEDIA TALK; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 358 words Since there are so many blogs about blogs, perhaps it is only natural that someone would start an online political site about online politics. Techpresident.com, which officially begins publishing today, will cover the online aspects of the coming presidential campaign, from candidates' efforts to establish an Internet presence to how their supporters use social networking technology. Unlike most politics sites, techpresident.com will be the online equivalent of a trade magazine, aimed at political professionals who need to keep up with the Internet and technology executives involved in creating the tools they use. A group blog with a dozen contributors, it is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, an online publishing and conference business owned by an Internet entrepreneur, Andrew Raseij. Although Mr. Raseij has been a donor and adviser to Democratic candidates -- he served as chairman of the technology advisory group of the Howard Dean campaign -- he has recruited former campaign workers from both parties as bloggers. ''When techies talk about technology, they tend to forget their politics,'' Mr. Raseij said. The site also offers a link to recent images of the campaign that have been uploaded to Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site, and a running total of the candidates' popularity on various social networking sites. (As of Friday, Barack Obama had the lead.) ''We think there's a big story here -- not only how the campaigns will make use of all of this technology, but how the voters will generate content,'' said Micah Sifry, the editor of the site as well as Personal Democracy Forum. ''It's the lateral connecting among voters that is the wild card.'' Such connections might not interest the average voter, and it is hard to tell how big an audience techpresident.com will reach. ''This is still a niche market,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But those in that niche now pay close attention to technology. ''There is now an expectation that something new will happen, equivalent to YouTube in 2006, and it will really matter,'' Mr. Rainie said. ROBERT LEVINE URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (90%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (90%); POLITICS (90%); INTERNET & WWW (91%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (78%); INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING (78%); ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING (78%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (90%); PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (90%); US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (90%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (73%); COMPUTER NETWORKS (72%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (69%); MARKET SEGMENTATION (67%); ELECTIONS (78%); PLATFORMS & ISSUES (77%); PUBLISHING (77%); MAGAZINE PUBLISHING (77%) Presidential Election of 2008; Computers and the Internet; Election Issues ORGANIZATION: Techpresident.com; Democracy Forum PERSON: BARACK OBAMA (54%) Robert Levine GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (79%) LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: A graph on techpresident.com keeps track of the number of MySpace friends for each presidential candidate. PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1134 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final A Neighbor Moves In With Ropes and Shackles, and Some Are Not So Pleased BYLINE: By JESSE McKINLEY SECTION: Section A; Column 1; National Desk; Pg. 14 LENGTH: 1036 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 It is hard to imagine a city prouder of its sexuality than San Francisco, a place with an active strip club district, a union for erotic dancers and an annual parade on Folsom Street where those not wearing leather and chaps are the odd ones out. So it came as something of a surprise when a kerfuffle arose because of the newest addition to the city's sexual landscape: the State Armory and Arsenal building, a 200,000-square-foot landmark in the Mission District that was just purchased by Kink.com, an online pornography company devoted to bondage and sadomasochism. Peter Acworth, the company's founder and chief executive, said he planned to turn the armory into a full-fledged film studio, with dirty movies shot in the basement and less-dirty ones shot upstairs. ''I want to make films like 'Secretary,' '' Mr. Acworth said, referring to the 2002 mainstream hit about a woman who has a kinky love affair with her lawyer boss. ''But with more sex.'' But somewhere between his purchase and the first paddling, Mr. Acworth has run into strong opposition from a group of neighborhood activists who long feared that the armory, vacant since 1975, would be converted into something truly taboo: condominiums. Some of the previous efforts to use the armory were derailed by anti-gentrification forces who wanted more affordable housing in the Mission, an economically and racially mixed area where hipsters and the homeless are represented in equal numbers. But this time around, opponents insist they are not being prudish, just prudent, considering the building's proximity to schools and families. ''Everybody thought it was going to be housing, and then mid-January, we get this bomb,'' said Anita Correa, who runs an arts theater in the neighborhood. ''Everybody was taken by shock.'' Ms. Correa added: ''The new owner said they would create jobs. But what kind of jobs are we talking about here?'' Mr. Acworth said his business was totally legitimate, with safe working conditions, willing and well-paid models, and a ''condom-only policy.'' (As for those jobs, Mr. Acworth said he was mainly talking about production assistants, including people working in props, sets, lighting and photography. ''We have a very low turnover,'' he said.) Mr. Acworth, a 36-year-old Briton and a former doctoral candidate in finance, started his company in 1997 out of his dorm room at business school, uniting his interest in business with other interests, namely tying people up. And his sites -- nine are up and running, and four more are on the way -- have apparently hit a nerve: in 2006, Kink.com had about $20 million in revenue and about 70 full-time employees, Mr. Acworth said. ''I think it's something that many more people are into than would otherwise admit,'' he said. ''And we present it in a friendly way. You see women smiling. It doesn't look like abuse, so it attracts people that are curious about it.'' Sure enough, a visit to Kink.com's main Web site shows women in a variety of painful-looking rope ensembles. Some are naked, some are nearly naked and some are, indeed, smiling. (Some, however, are not.) The company's current downtown offices are filled with editors and Webmasters who sit before row after row of large-screen computers, while bored-looking crew members haul lights, cameras and cat-o'-nine-tails from set -- dungeon, jail cell, suburbia -- to set. Mr. Acworth said he was looking to expand his fast-growing business and fell in love with the castle-like armory the moment he laid eyes on its lower levels. ''The basement had a series of rooms that looked like dungeons,'' said Mr. Acworth, who bought the building from a private developer for $14.5 million. ''It just has such character.'' The Kink.com plan is the latest chapter in the long and somewhat tortured history of the armory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Built between 1912 and 1914, the brick-and-mortar building has long been a redevelopment challenge for San Francisco, with its landmark status and the city's famously vociferous activist set derailing plan after plan over the last three decades. Among the possible occupants have been a nonprofit rehabilitation clinic; a mainstream film studio and sound stage; and a gym that would have taken advantage of the building's 70-foot ceilings to install a rock-climbing wall. In 2000, a plan for a dot-com office was derailed, as was a subsequent idea to use the armory's enclosed drill yard -- itself the size of a football field -- to house computer servers. The most recent plan before Kink.com's purchase was for a mixed-use residential and office project that would have built luxury apartments and some lower-income housing atop and alongside the existing building. Tim Frye, a historic preservation specialist for the San Francisco Planning Department, said the architecture of the armory -- small, narrow windows; no elevator; poor insulation -- meant that any major conversion would most likely have been complicated by the building's landmark status. ''It's not a friendly building,'' Mr. Frye said. ''It's really imposing, and a lot of the preservation board thinks that housing wasn't a really good use.'' Planning officials said Kink.com had no major governmental hurdles because it planned to do very little to the building, aside from fixing some windows and installing some shackles. But there will be a public meeting in April, they said, to hear any concerns from the community, at the request of Mayor Gavin Newsom. (Mr. Newsom has had his own sex-related problems, having recently admitted an affair with his campaign manager's wife.) Mr. Acworth said he wanted to be a good neighbor -- he recently appeared at a local merchants association meeting and has offered to hold the next one -- while still being a naughty boy. Kink.com has already shot its first scenes in the armory, which has ready-to-use settings, including a shower room, a boiler room and a collection of horse stables. Mr. Acworth also predicted that his neighbors would eventually embrace his presence. ''It's a company built here in San Francisco with San Franciscans,'' he said. ''I just think it needs time to register.'' URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: PORNOGRAPHY & OBSCENITY (90%); PARADES & MARCHES (78%); SHOOTINGS (76%); CONDOMINIUMS (76%); MOVIE INDUSTRY (74%); PHOTOGRAPHY (74%); MOVIE & VIDEO PRODUCTION (74%); FUR & LEATHER CLOTHING (72%); RESIDENTIAL CO-OWNERSHIP (70%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (70%); EMPLOYMENT GROWTH (61%); JOB CREATION (61%); LAWYERS (52%); FILM (88%); BUSINESS EDUCATION (68%); MOVIE FILMING (74%) Pornography; Armories; Housing; Motion Pictures; Pornography ORGANIZATION: Kink.com PERSON: Jesse Mckinley GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (94%) CALIFORNIA, USA (94%) UNITED STATES (94%) San Francisco (Calif) LOAD-DATE: February 12, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photos: Peter Acworth, the founder of Kink.com, inside the State Armory and Arsenal building in San Francisco, where he recently moved his company. People gathered outside it on Thursday to protest the new occupant. (Photographs by Jim Wilson/The New York Times) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1135 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
By Alpine's standards Eddie Farrell's house is hardly jaw-dropping. A five-bedroom split-level ranch with a lawn and swimming pool, it is to all outward appearances a slice of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class domesticity. But buzz the intercom, and a visitor soon descends into a hip-hop version of Bruce Wayne's Batcave: a gleaming wonderland of computers, keyboards and recording gadgetry hidden behind the soundproofed suburban facade. On a recent winter morning Mr. Farrell, a producer and D.J. known professionally as Eddie F., was holding court in his Mini Mansion Recording studio. Loading a pair of MP3 files -- recent releases by Young Jeezy and Jay-Z -- he used the Serato Scratch Live program and a pair of time-coded control records on his Technics 1200 turntables to execute a series of precise cuts and scratches. ''It's all digital, but the sound, the touch, everything's the same as we used to get with vinyl back in the day,'' he said. Some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, from 50 Cent to TLC to Mary J. Blige, have made the pilgrimage to Mr. Farrell's basement to record and mix hits, a fact well documented by the rows of platinum-sales plaques and Ascap songwriting awards on his walls. But his more buttoned-down neighbors would never know it. ''I try to keep a real low profile,'' he said, casually dressed in a gray T-shirt, gray shorts and black slippers, a diamond stud adorning his left earlobe. He made the move from his native Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1990, at the height of his success as the D.J. of Heavy D & the Boyz. ''I was one of the first out here in Alpine,'' he said. ''There was no one doing hip-hop out here back then. I used to have to give people real specific directions to get out here to do a session.'' Seventeen years later they all know the way. Hip-hop has come to Bergen County full force, and this tiny, affluent town has blossomed into the favored bedroom community of rap's moneyed set, including artists like Sean (Diddy) Combs, Lil' Kim and Fabolous and music executives like Andre Harrell and Damon Dash. Giving a tour of his home and recording complex, Mr. Farrell pointed out the loft space where Mr. Combs used to sleep. ''As a matter of fact Puffy used to live with me for about a year or two,'' he said, using Mr. Combs's now-retired nom de rap. These days Mr. Combs hardly needs to crash on a homeboy's sofa. The house he recently bought here, for a reported $7 million, is a 17,000-square-foot hilltop mansion with eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, indoor and outdoor pools (complete with waterfall), racquetball and basketball courts, a home theater, a wine cellar and a six-car garage. The rapper-turned-C.E.O. Andre Harrell says it all started in nearby Englewood. ''The first attraction was the glamour of the Hollywood in Jersey that Eddie Murphy created,'' he said. When Mr. Harrell moved to Alpine in 1990, however, he found something quite different. ''The trees and the rugged kind of nature had a serenity. If you came from an environment of any sort of urban blight, it made you feel like you've finally made it and you're at peace. It was so serene and storybooklike. It was the kind of thing you grew up watching on television. You said, 'O.K., this is what the American dream is.' '' Fabolous, the rapper who grew up as John Jackson in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, said the seclusion and serenity in Alpine remain a major attraction for the younger generation of hip-hop stars. ''It's a quieter environment,'' he said. ''It's being able to get away from the whole hustle and bustle of the city. It puts you in a different zone, into a real comfort zone when you're working.'' The town has long been defined by its deliberately low profile. There is no thriving downtown, no velvet-rope restaurants, no reason to come here unless you belong. Even the mail knows its place: in other towns, civil servants might stride right up to your home and drop off your letters, but in Alpine, where homes are preceded by heavy gates and long driveways, your letters are respectfully held for you until you send someone for them. Lately, however, the town has begun appearing in both lyrics and news reports. On her song ''Aunt Dot,'' Lil' Kim name-checked it: ''Come on Shanice, I'm takin' you to my house in Alpine,'' she rapped. And last year, when she was released from a federal prison, reporters trailed her back to her luxurious Alpine town house, where she served 30 days on house arrest. IT marks a strange moment in the evolution of hip-hop when its stars view Ivy League-educated, old-money establishment figures as the most desirable neighbors. And it's a strange moment in the evolution of American capital when that old-money establishment begins to view the hip-hop stars the same way. But on one level at least it makes perfect sense, given the mainstreaming of a once underground musical genre and its celebration of C.E.O. culture. ''I don't buy out the bar, I bought the night spot/I got the right stock,'' Jay-Z raps on his new album. Jeff Chang, the author of the hip-hop history ''Can't Stop Won't Stop,'' said: ''Rap fortunes form as powerful an American myth as is the creativity of poverty. When these rap entrepreneurs move to Alpine, they embody a new way of envisioning the classic American capitalist story. It's why Russell Simmons and Diddy have called their clothing lines 'urban aspirational.' '' On a freezing January afternoon Wendy Credle, an entertainment lawyer and real estate agent who has lived in the Alpine area for years, and Jade Stone, a bank loan officer, offered a reporter a driving tour. ''The land value out here is through the roof,'' Ms. Credle said. ''I know people that tear down their own house and rebuild, because they've got such amazing property value in the land.'' The new houses resemble Mediterranean villas or small hotel complexes, with immense indoor-outdoor pools and garages that could double as airplane hangars. That kind of room, Ms. Credle said, ''affords you the head space to be creative.'' Ms. Stone, who helped secure mortgages for leading rappers like Cam'ron and Biggie Smalls, said it had not always been an easy move to make: ''A few years ago, I had a client -- she was a major artist too -- that had excellent credit, over $2 million in the bank, was buying a house for a million-five, and because she was a new, young artist, the underwriter didn't want to give her a mortgage.'' No longer, she said. ''I would say that now the banks are fighting for these guys. If I bring in a client like Jim Jones'' -- a rapper who is part of Cam'ron's crew -- ''you'll have three or four banks competing to do his mortgage.'' In part that is a matter of pure arithmetic. ''The entry level now, they're making $20 million,'' Ms. Stone said. ''The entry level back then, they were making maybe a million, so they bought a three- or four-hundred-thousand-dollar town house. Then as they got bigger, like Kim, they moved up to a $800,000 town house. Then they bought the million-five home.'' And what about the other side of the hip-hop lifestyle, the partying that earned Mr. Combs the ire of some of his Hamptons neighbors? ''There's no issue where he is now,'' Ms. Credle said, explaining that in the Hamptons his guests had to park on the street. ''On his estate now, trust me, he's got room to park as many guests as he wants.'' It's all very discreet. (And fittingly, through a publicist, Mr. Combs declined to comment for this article.) Experts say the phenomenon of the newly rich gravitating toward country-club enclaves like Alpine is well established in American society. ''The old adage is 'crowding into the winner's circle,' '' said Jim Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. ''And so these superaffluent communities are very desirable for the big winners in our society, and there's always the contrast between the old money and new money.'' Especially in the case of hip-hop stars, many of whom insist they'll never lose touch with their street roots. But despite these contrasts, Mr. Hughes said, these groups have more in common than it might seem. ''You have the new ultra-wealthy whose wealth may have come from sports and entertainment rather than conventional business like the corporate chieftains, lawyers, hedge-fund managers and the like. But where they want to live reflects the same values. They want to live with other winners in society. They want to live in the prestige areas. They want to live in areas that are somewhat secluded and offer them protection from citizens like you and I.'' INCORPORATED in 1903, Alpine started out as a sleepy, wooded outpost. In 1937 Frank Sinatra had his first important gig here at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse where he did double duty as headwaiter. Today the population of 2,183 is still overwhelmingly white (77 percent, according to the 2000 United States census, compared with 19 percent Asian, 2.5 percent Latino and 1.5 percent African-American). But the roadhouse era is long gone. In 2005 Alpine's ZIP code, 07620, was identified by American Demographics magazine as the seventh most affluent in the country. And a high percentage of the black homeowners are celebrities from the worlds of music, film and sports, like Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Wesley Snipes, Gary Sheffield and Patrick Ewing. Still, the public culture of celebrity does not seem to have followed them home. ''Alpine was always a pretty sleepy place, and that's the way we try to keep it,'' said Paul Tomasko, the town's mayor. ''You mentioned Stevie Wonder. He has owned a house here for quite a while now, but we rarely see him around. In fact I've never seen him here. You mentioned Chris Rock. I've seen him a total of one time in all the years that he has lived here.'' Mr. Farrell said music industry heavyweights run into one another at places like Dimora Ristorante, in Norwood, or the Kiku sushi house in Alpine. They say hello at the post office. That's about it. The adjacent towns of Bergen County have their own constellation of hip-hop stars. Wyclef Jean, Reverend Run and Ja Rule are Saddle River residents. Mary J. Blige has a mansion in Cresskill. Yet even among these elite addresses, Alpine has a distinct cachet. One of New Jersey's leading real estate agents, Michele Kolsky-Assatly of Coldwell Banker, said that had to do with its limited housing supply. The last remaining privately held country clubs were sold off in the past few years and turned into Alpine's newest cul de sac neighborhoods. ''There is no more land in eastern Bergen County,'' she said. ''It is gone. The land is finished.'' Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, who has worked with Damon Dash and Jay-Z, added that unlike older communities in Westchester County or Long Island, these new neighborhoods -- which she says her clientele prefers -- have no history of discrimination. ''There's no historical anything,'' she said. ''This is all new.'' Though the median house price in Alpine has been estimated by Forbes at more than $1.7 million, real estate experts say the numbers are now much higher. ''This side of the street is Cresskill; this side is Alpine,'' Ms. Kolsky-Assatly said during a recent drive. ''These are all two-acre lots, each worth between two and a half to three million dollars for the land alone. On the Cresskill side the houses go for five million and change; on the Alpine side they go for double that.'' But taxes are low: there are few public school students and a minuscule police force. Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for ''park jams'' where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin. They dreamed of something better, but it was all relative. ''When we were starting out with Heavy D,'' Mr. Farrell said, ''I remember guys rapping about Jettas like it was this almost unattainable car.'' Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang, in the seminal ''Rapper's Delight,'' boasted of having ''a color TV, so I can see the Knicks play basketball.'' Can leafy suburbs and 21st-century mansions be equally conducive to that creative process? Mr. Farrell shrugged: ''By the time you're getting ready to make records, you've pretty much lived a whole lifetime of music culture. You've been in the streets, you've been in the clubs. So at the end of the day you can go into Sony studios in Manhattan or come to my place.'' In designing Mini Mansion Recording, he said, he attempted to bring the best aspects of several popular hip-hop recording spots to Bergen County, right down to the 1980s vintage Pac-Man video game in the studio lounge. And he modeled his mixing console on that of Greene Street Recording, where Hank Shocklee recorded Public Enemy. But what about lyrical content? Can a rapper really stay true to his street roots when his neighbors are horseback-riding hedge-fund managers and wild deer are scampering across his dew-covered front lawn? ''First of all, when you talk about New Jersey, you're not talking about Beverly Hills,'' Mr. Harrell said. ''The influence of the urban experience is 30 minutes away, but you don't have to be in the noise all the time.'' He added, ''You have to have quiet as an artist to hear your inner voice.'' And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. ''I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,'' he said, ''just to remind myself how far I've come and get inspiration from that. And I don't think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.'' He added, laughing, ''If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.'' Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By armand limnande section: Section mm; Column 0; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; Pg. 76 Length Download 4.36 Mb. Share with your friends:
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